OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
The White House has issued a response after President Joe Biden went viral on Wednesday for appearing to claim he has cancer.
While speaking in Somerset, Massachusetts, Biden talked about his childhood and oil pollution growing up in Delaware, saying he wanted to create energy jobs and enact more measures to protect the climate.
“Five years ago, this towering power plant that once stood with cooling towers 500 feet high closed down,” Biden said. “The coal plant at Brayton Point was the largest of its kind in New England. 1,500 megawatts of power, enough to power one in five Massachusetts homes and businesses.”
“I just lived up the road in an apartment complex when we moved to Delaware, and just up the road a little school I went to, Holy Rosary grade school, and because it was a four-lane highway that was accessible, my mother drove us and rather than us be able to walk,” Biden said. “And guess what? The first frost, you know what was happening, you’d have to put on your windshield wipers to get literally the oil slick off the window.”
Biden said in his speech that he “has” cancer — present tense.
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President Joe Biden to crowd: "I and so damn many other people I grew up with have cancer."
What? The president has cancer? pic.twitter.com/b9fwgF2xnT
— Carmine Sabia (@CarmineSabia) July 20, 2022
The White House clarified that he was referring to minor skin cancer removals before his presidency, claiming that Biden “mistakenly stated (present tense) that he has cancer.”
Update: WH official tells me POTUS was referring to past removal of skin cancer in his remarks from Massachusetts.
Biden mistakenly stated (present tense) that he has cancer.
— Jacqui Heinrich (@JacquiHeinrich) July 20, 2022
Earlier this week, a former top official in President Bill Clinton’s administration became the latest Democrat to speak out against Biden.
Robert Reich, the 76-year-old former Labor secretary, referenced his own age to counsel the president not to run again in 2024, citing his “dwindling capacities.”
“It’s not death that’s the worrying thing about a second Biden term,” Reich wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian regarding Biden, who is 79. “It’s the dwindling capacities that go with aging.”
The op-ed itself ran under a curt headline: “As a 76-year-old let me say: Joe Biden is too old to run again.”
“Biden’s secret service detail can worry about his wallet, and he’s got a teleprompter for wayward nouns, but I’m sure he’s experiencing some diminution in the memory department,” Reich continued as the far-left figure turned the issue political.
“I’m also noticing less patience, perhaps because of an unconscious ‘use by’ timer now clicking away. I’m less tolerant of long waiting lines, automated phone menus, and Republicans,’ he wrote, adding: “How the hell does Biden maintain tact or patience when he has to deal with Joe Manchin?”
Reich is far from the only one who is concerned about Biden’s alleged senility and increasing frailty.
Texas GOP Rep. Ronny Jackson, the former White House physician who served during the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, has become the most vocal on the issue of Biden’s mental capacities.
In fact, Jackson just discussed the issue recently with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, who suggested that Biden’s mental decline was apparent on the campaign trail.
“There were signs that Joe Biden was declining during the 2020 campaign. I mean, let’s face it. He stayed in the basement the whole time during the campaign. So who knew what when?” she said.
“Well, that’s the big question everybody’s asking, who’s really pulling the strings, who’s running the country right now? We don’t know the answer to that. We don’t know if it’s Susan Rice or Ron Klain or if it’s Joe Biden or who it is, but somebody else is doing this. They’re doing exactly what you said, they’re rolling him out at specific times during the day, he’s got good days and bad days,” Jackson said.
“And whether or not they have him on drugs, I don’t know. There are drugs out that that can increase your alertness and your memory and things of that nature, you know, cover stuff like this up temporarily. So, I’m sure some of that is going on as well, but we don’t know because his physician hasn’t stood up and took the questions that I took when I was Trump’s physician and answered those questions,” the physician and Texas lawmaker continued.
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